MeteorJS has done some pretty impressive progress over the last year. The early 2015 saw the advent of Meteor 1.0 that supported development on Windows machines. In the fall of that same year Meteor 1.2 came out with initial support for ReactJS and AngularJS as additional view layers. And now we are all looking forward to Meteor 1.3.

At Meteor Devshop, Matt DeBergalis was excited and proud to share where the platform is heading, why in that direction and how the creators see the trends in Meteor and JavaScript development. Who is Matt DeBergalis? Well, only the co-founder of the Meteor project, constantly improving and refining our favorite JavaScript platform and shaping the MeteorJS future.

According to Matt’s MeteorJS 1.3 review, there are four great innovations to look after in the biggest release to date.

1. Making Meteor a more viable option for larger apps

MeteorJS is great for building small to medium apps, or for MVP development but as its reputation grows, so do the apps developed with MeteorJS. IKEA, Mazda, PGA TOUR are now successfully using it to create large apps by big teams. So, the platform is moving toward being explicit and having the tools to help larger teams make great progress over months and years with an app. This will mainly be available thanks to the built-in 100% standard compliance support for ECMAScript 2015 modules. BTW, it will not change the way your current Meteor app works.

Built-in testing was the most requested feature, according to Matt. Good news! In MeteorJS 1.3 you will have two options for doing tests:

Unit testing. When running in the test mode, the Meteor tool will take none of your project (you won’t bring in any of the automatic loading you get with traditional Meteor); your test file will manually import just the pieces that it needs.

Integration testing. The loader will run the app code as it normally runs in the development mode and whatever the testing files you’ve written.

According to Matt’s MeteorJS review, its creators have worked a lot on mobile. They’ve renovated a great deal of the original Cordova-based mobile infrastructure that comes with Meteor and allows publishing your app not just for the browser but also as an installable application that runs on Android and iOS devices. More good news for mobile enthusiasts: WKWebView built into Meteor 1.3, new native wrappers for both Android & iOS and higher performance Hot Code Pushes.

2. Aligning Meteor with the rest of the JavaScript Ecosystem

Meteor 1.3 offers much closer alignment with the JavaScript Ecosystem. And this is really vital, because so much is happening in the JavaScript world now! Also, Meteor 1.3 will support NPM and four of the most popular view layers: Blaze, React, Angular 1 and Angular 2.

3. Making Meteor a platform more open to community contribution

The creators of MeteorJS are looking forward to making it a platform open to community contribution. You too can become a part of this much more diverse ecosystem of contributors and authors.

4. Meteor’s big investment in data

The Meteor team has been working hard on the platform’s ability to go from a database query on the server to having that data available on the client and being able to manipulate it. In Meteor 1.3 you will be able to do that not just on MongoDB but with SQL, Redis, REST API Endpoints and many other databases.

Enter the Apollo data stack, which is Meteor’s new revision of the live-data synchronization tool, designed to support modern databases and REST API Endpoints in addition to MongoDB. Let’s all hope that Apollo will become the standard data stack that can be used for all the workload in a Meteor app.